The Database That Refused to Die: How Postgres Survived its Own Creators
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
From academic toss-aside to cloud substrate:
Today Postgres is one of the most widely used database systems, but its launch and subsequent development were inauspicious to say the least.
If it weren't for a league of exceptionally devoted open source contributors, it probably would be another forgotten also-ran just like Ingres, the database system on which it was based ("Postgres" was shorthand for "Post-Ingres").
The creator of both systems,Michael Stonebraker, is perhaps the preeminent database pioneer in the field. Earlier this month,he spoke at PGDay, a conference in Boston hosted by the U.S. PostgreSQL Association, where he detailed the complicated history of the open source database system, which actually existed long before the term "open source" was even uttered.
In a sense, "Postgres is the epitome of open source software, because it doesn't belong to anybody. It was picked up by this team of programmers without any specific affiliation," Stonebraker said.
Stonebraker essentially abandoned Postgres in the mid-1990s. But instead of fading into obscurity, the codebase was salvaged by a fiercely-dedicated volunteer community that bolted on standard SQL while preserving Stonebraker's revolutionary extensible architecture.
Three decades later, this stubbornly-independent database has become the bedrock of modern cloud infrastructure.
When it comes to relational database systems,British computer scientist and then-IBM employeeTed Codd got the ball rolling in 1970. A database is where you store your data so it can be queried in a predictable way. A database system is the software that manages the database (don't confuse the two).
That year, Codd decreed that all data should be stored in tables and accessed using a high-level query language. IBM implemented Codd's idea in System R, and created SQL as the query language. The results were eventually rolled into IBM's DB2.
Stonebraker, then an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, also implemented Codd's ideas. Stonebraker and his team of grad students created not only a working prototype, but a full-scale implementation - he later cofounded a startup, Relational Technology, to sell Ingres commercially. Ingres did not use SQL, but instead employed another query language, QUEL (Query Language), although the fundamentals were similar.
A relatively primitive version of Ingres was even released gratis for academic research. But by the early 1980s, Stonebraker had "pushed the code off a cliff" and started building something new.
Thus, Postgreswas born.
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